Lets get rid of the 20 minimum character limit

its annoying.

moretext

Yes, it is annoying but it helps utilizing the “like” feature instead of +1’s and me2’s and allows us to reply with contextually richer comments.

And you can always pad your <20 comments with xoxo’s :smile:

2 Likes

That statement seemed like a contradiction…you want richer comments and replies but want to utilize the like feature?

What if you wanted to simply reply with a “thanks” or any number of short comments. If people want to like a post they still can, and it gets rid of the annoying factor.

Personally, I hate the long threads of “+1” on GitHub, I wish people would just put more thought into each post and actually explain their context, situation, and motivations, rather than delivering the minimum amount of text.

7 Likes

The +1 is for requested features. Obviously their “context, situation, and motivation” is that they want that feature.

Eg. For Meteors android deploy on Windows, everyone who has +1 that request obviously wants to deploy an android app on Windows lol. Would you rather have them all say “I want the Meteor deploy android feature on windows so I can deploy to android on Windows”.

+im not quite sure what kind of forum post would see +1 as an answer…

Or profanity, threats, output of cat /dev/urandom | base64, etc. Lots of options.

It’s not a contradiction. For richer response, a comment on the thread if appropriate. If all you want to do is show support and not contribute to the discussion, just click the +1 or whatever equivalent. The character minimum is to discourage people leaving a comment that is only “+1” or something like that.

2 Likes

as an aside, i tried to reply “+0.99999999999999999” but it triggered an error. possibly, staff is trying to block this behavior in other ways

That statement seemed like a contradiction…you want richer comments and replies but want to utilize the like feature?

I guess you did not see where I’m coming from. I’m rooting for improving or signal/noise ratio such that when we skim through a thread, we know that the comments provide opinions that are more than mere recognition or agreement. That, we have the like button for.

Besides, number of comments and the like button provide additional technical context to discourse in such a way that what number of comments on a thread signals is different from what likes on a comment signals. While +1’s may serve towards the popularity of a thread, it certainly undermines the mechanism that bubbles valuable comments.

2 Likes

Maybe we should look at it the other way around:

Maybe it should be possible to “qualify” a “like” with a comment with less than 20 chars. Like, sometimes it would feel more satisfying to me to add a short comment like “I so agree with this!” or “that’s been my experience exactly as well!” (that may have been > 20 ;))… and if I could add a like-comment that would work well and not make me feel bad about cluttering up the general conversation. But I’d still know that the author of the post I like-commented would get the message and everyone who cared to hover over the “X likes”-button as well, and the rest, who doesn’t, wouldn’t need to.

Edit: Actually, I think StackOverflow for example has something that’s at least conceptually similar or serves a similar purpose. On SO you can post a full answer - which is similar to a comment in a thread on here - or you can leave a comment on an answer, which takes up much less space and can more easily be distinguished and ignored by our eyes and brains.

Yeah, I think this is a consequence of Discourse’s design. Since every comment/post is in one linear thread, extraneous comments can be pretty distracting. But it’s what we have, and I think in this forum the way it exists now it’s better to only have comments with useful content.

The things is while qualifying your “like” with a short comment sounds good and it’s often tempting to share your experience like that, saying, “That happened to me too” is not useful content. Even a post about a problem with lots of people saying, “this happened to me too!” is just anecdotal at best and representative of forum readers only.

Perhaps a way like you mentioned with regards to SO might work if people could leave sub comments that are hidden by default. But you might end up in a scenario where you have to put a maximum limit on characters for these sub-comments or risk fragmenting the discussion.

1 Like